Editor’s Column

“I set this matter down . . . to inform myself”: Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America as Private Discourse

Will Ray’s review of biographer William Souder’s Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck asserts,

As for Travels with Charley, Souder vindicates the investigative work of Bill Steigerwald, the newspaper reporter whose book Dogging Steinbeck showed where, when, and how Steinbeck fictionalized the record of his road trip with his wife’s French poodle. Ignored or rejected by Steinbeck scholars when he wrote his book, “Steigerwald could be forgiven for applying the rules of journalism to a work that purported to be journalism. First among those rules is that facts matter.”

(357–58)

Ray’s assertion, Souder’s approval, and Steigerwald’s misdirected investigation seem to me misguided. I find that Steinbeck sets forth his intentions clearly from the onset. Early on in Charley, he states, “I set this matter down . . . to inform myself.” And this statement is reinforced numerous times in numerous ways throughout Charley, well establishing this book’s status as private discourse. In discussing Cannery Row, Warren French states, “The artist . . . is not a reporter, but a magician who conjures up a new world and provides us with a perspective for examining ours” (19–20). This observation applies to Charley. By his careful delineation of his intentions to inform himself, Steinbeck leaves himself free to conjure, to imagine, to take poetic license as he sees fit.

Travels with Charley in Search of America may well be classified as private discourse, leaving this work to stand alone among his other works of fiction and nonfiction. In the opening of Charley, Steinbeck elucidates his purpose for informing himself: “So I was determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundation of the larger truth” (5). He is a seeker on a quest to discover a “larger truth.” The emphasis on Steinbeck’s own looking and seeing runs as a leitmotif throughout the book from his opening determination “to look again” to his final keen insights on his own and Charley’s longing for New York City and home. He hopes to learn to “see” again, delving deep inside of things, to eternal verities. His journey, then, is not so much a travelogue as it is a quest in search of the essence not only of his country, but also of himself.

He intentionally rejects any idea that he is a reporter or that he is reporting, quite purposefully distancing himself from journalism: “I’ve always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. I envy this technique and at the same time do not trust it as a mirror of reality. . . . In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself ” (59–60). This is another version of Steinbeck’s conviction that all reports, however “true,” are warped by the viewer’s experience and heritage. Note the opening of Sea of Cortez:

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there. . . . We have a book to write about California. . . . We have decided to let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea; its duration a six weeks’ charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits—our own without reservation.

(1)

So it is with Travels with Charley, a book shaped by the mind of the writer, its subject everything Steinbeck “could see and think and even imagine; its limits . . . [his...